The Lifecycle of a Digital Asset

The life of a digital asset can be a tumultuous one.

Imagine you’re a logo for a limited-edition Pumpkin Ale that’s only available around Thanksgiving. Once you’ve gone through multiple iterations of designs, you’re finally ready to be shared with your company. Designers email you to sales and marketing teams, where you live on separate hard drives and spend weeks being uploaded to web pages and promotional emails.

Then, it’s time for you to get out into the real world. You get placed on bottle labels, six-pack packaging, coasters, coozies — even a poster for the local liquor store!

Multiple versions of you get emailed throughout your organization, sent to printers, and delivered to distributors across the nation.

Once you arrive at your destinations, you need to explain how each version of yourself should be printed and appear in context. And, did I mention that you somehow have to disappear once Thanksgiving is over?

For marketing and design teams, managing an asset from start to finish is an exhausting process.

After all, how do you ensure each person has access to the most up-to-date version of every asset, and specific guidelines for usage?

That you’re not wasting time playing email tag to figure it all out?

This is where Digital Asset Management (DAM) comes in to save the day.

Take a look at the infographic we’ve created to illustrate the various stages of a digital asset, and why DAM is essential to your team’s productivity.

If you’re in need of an intuitive, easy-to-use, and visually elegant DAM system, check out Brandfolder. We help make the crazy life of a digital asset not so crazy by providing powerfully simple tools to manage each stage of its lifecycle.

We’ve also got a few extra special features to help make brand management even easier, like embed options for easy asset updating, advanced sharing permissions through collections, and analytics to track asset usage.

Katerina Jeng is the Digital Marketing Coordinator at Brandfolder, a powerfully simple tool for storing, sharing, and showcasing your digital assets. She enjoys traveling, writing, and all things hip-hop. Follow her on Twitter for marketing goodness and snippets of everyday life.